


wonder where your heart came from

by moogle62



Category: Reign (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 21:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2597171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moogle62/pseuds/moogle62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Catherine once told her that history was written by the survivors. Mary hadn’t quite understood at the time - not properly, not <i>really</i> - but now she knows there are many different kinds of surviving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wonder where your heart came from

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sights by London Grammar. Trigger/content warnings in the end notes, just in case <3 Vague spoilers through 2x06.
> 
> Can I decide how Catherine/Mary I want this or anything ever to be? NOPE. Here we go anyway.

It’s certainly not what Mary might have expected but she’s started seeking Catherine out. 

To her credit, Catherine has said nothing about Mary’s new-found interest in her company. She’s not welcoming, exactly, but that’s not what Mary wants from her. 

//

Catherine doesn’t school Mary in the ways of poison, but she does let her watch. Catherine is steady and sure at her work, handling coloured jars and stoppered bottles with the delicate touch of a mother with her newborn or a craftsman with newly blown glass.

Mary flinches the first time she sees one of Catherine’s little birds fall, stiff-winged, from its gilt cage perch - but only the first time.

“It died too quickly,” is Mary’s first observation. 

It’s been a week, maybe two, since Catherine first allowed Mary to stay with her all afternoon, silently working while Mary sat against the arcing stone window frame and let the sun slowly set behind her, unwatched.

Catherine turns to her, eyebrow already raised. “I thought I was clear, Mary, that this is no place for the tender-hearted.”

“It died too quickly,” Mary repeats, gathering her skirts and walking to the bird cage. She reaches through the tiny bars of the cage, stops just short of touching the bird’s green feathers. She turns back to face Catherine. “There wouldn’t be time to escape suspicion.”

Catherine folds her arms. She looks at Mary for a long moment and Mary, who has grown used to reading Catherine’s face in these few close days, cannot begin to fathom what she is thinking.

“Good,” Catherine finally says. “I see we are agreed.”

Mary nods. 

Catherine goes back to work without another word but when Mary steps closer to her dressing counter, Catherine shifts aside, giving her the space to see.

//

Sometimes Mary remembers Catherine dressed all in red in the candlelight, spilling her own blood just to force Mary’s hand. It was like all she had to prove her own heart was its physical contents, dripping to the ground to stain her shoes as red as her gown. Mary’s hands hadn’t shaken as she’d bound Catherine’s wrists, though she might have wished they had.

Catherine’s hands had. 

Mary can’t forget what that felt like, Catherine trembling under her touch.

//

Catherine has started carrying a bunch of sage with her wherever she goes. Mary finds out by accident, stumbling across Catherine unexpectedly one morning. Mary can’t sleep, has been walking the cold castle halls since the first pale dawn hours, before the sun has had time to warm the castle stones.

The castle has always seemed different in the night hours. The candles that flicker along its walls cast moving shadows that Mary always wants to avoid. She doesn’t, of course. She walks straight through them with the posture of a queen, but down at the bottom of her heart something superstitious tugs at her, whispers at her to tread carefully or lock her doors.

She turns a corner into a long corridor and there is Catherine, pressed flat against a window. The careful morning light is streaming in around her, casting her shadow long across the floor. She is clutching the stone sides of the window like it’s the only thing holding her up - or, Mary realizes, looking closer, the only thing holding her _back_.

“Catherine,” Mary gasps. It feels like it’s punched out of her, a shocked exhale of breath.

Catherine snaps round to Mary. Her face is white. Mary starts forward, entirely on instinct, just as Catherine breathes, “ _Mary_ ,” in a tone Mary has never heard before, never expected to hear from Catherine. It’s like Catherine was drowning and Mary pulled her out of the water, like she was in the pitchest dark and Mary handed her a light.

“Don’t,” Catherine snaps, as Mary comes closer. “I’ve - “ She pauses and visibly pulls herself together. Mary can see it in her body, the way she draws herself up taut, a queen again and not a woman cowering against a wall. When she speaks again, she sounds herself. “I dropped my sage.”

Mary follows Catherine’s gaze. There’s a bundle of herbs on the floor just a little way from Catherine’s feet. It’s bound with twine like a posey and Catherine is staring at it like it could save her.

Carefully, strangely unwilling to look away from Catherine frozen in the strengthening morning sun, Mary stoops down and picks the sage from the ground. When she hands it to Catherine, Catherine breathes out.

Slowly, the sage clasped tight in her palm, Catherine steps away from the window.

Mary reaches out to her the way she would to someone just risen from a sickbed, a steadying presence. Catherine doesn’t brush her away.

//

There are noises in the halls at night now. Mary has been hearing them since the plague but with the size of the castle, the number of people, some noise is always to be expected. Sound carries oddly here, pocketed close in some places but flung the length of a corridor in other. As children, she and Francis passed each other messages from almost a castle wing length apart, whispering them into the stone corners like the deepest secret only to have their words repeated back to themselves on a giggle from the other.

Still, something about these noises is setting Mary’s teeth on edge. She feels foolish but she requests a handful of sage from the kitchen servants, ties it with a hair ribbon she never quite felt suited her colouring. Francis laughs when she places it beneath her pillow but she tells him she’d rather be safe than sorry.

“Rather be _sage_ than sorry,” he says, still laughing, and Mary hits him with a pillow.

//

If Mary keeps a closer eye on Catherine than usual, neither of them mention it. The days go on, and so do they.

//

Something wakes Mary from her sleep one night. At first, as is always the way, she doesn’t know why she has woken - but then the sound comes again. 

It’s soft. Quiet. Footsteps in the corridor. 

Mary realizes, with a cold jolt that she doesn’t recognise their tread. She knows her guards and she knows her ladies the same as anyone, she assumes, that spends enough time in the same place with the same people might. 

The noise comes again, closer. Mary finds she is holding her breath.

Beside her, Francis sleeps on, untroubled. Mary thinks about waking him, wants it so deeply she almost aches for it, but can’t bring herself to reach out. She doesn’t want Francis to feel the way she does, the heart-pumping, clammy chill of fear that keeps her in its fight or flight grasp.

The footsteps stop. 

_They’re right outside_ , Mary thinks, heart thumping hard enough to hurt. She thinks, _What if they come in?_

Wildly, she bolts up in bed. The moonlight sidling through the windows is just enough, just barely enough, for her to see the door handle, slowly, turning.

Mary doesn’t scream, because worse things have happened in this room than a door trying to open in the night, but she has to bite her lip to make it happen, keep the sound back. She tastes blood, and the door, more slowly than anything Mary could ever had conjured in her darkest nightmares, begins to swing open into the room.

//

Catherine once told her that history was written by the survivors. Mary hadn’t quite understood at the time - not properly, not _really_ \- but now she knows there are many different kinds of surviving.

//

Mary runs half the length of the castle, breathless, bare feet slapping against the stone, before she rounds a corner and crashes straight into Catherine, rushing towards Mary’s chambers.

Catherine catches her on what looks like instinct, steadying her by the elbows. Then Catherine takes a proper look at her - Mary knows she’s a state: in her nightdress in the middle of the castle, barefoot and half-terrified - and pulls her in closer.

Mary’s heart is still beating hard enough that she half wonders whether Catherine will feel it, panicked and reeling, through both of their nightdresses. 

“I saw,” she gasps, against Catherine’s shoulder. “I saw - “

Catherine smoothes a hand through Mary’s hair like it’s years and years ago and Mary is small again, crying over a hurt ankle at the first garden party she went to in France. “I know,” she says. “We both did.”

Mary clutches on to her. Slowly, surely, her heart rate steadies.

**Author's Note:**

> Mention of (canonical) self-inflicted injury. Death of a bird. 
> 
> I will always warn for anything you think I should <3


End file.
